Solution providers must help their customers move fast, prioritize customer experience, and focus on apps when advising on cloud migration strategies, said principal analyst Dave Bartoletti at the NexGen Cloud Conference.

Solution providers will have to find ways to align their businesses with a couple of key public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure as those companies extend their reach into ever more markets, or risk being left behind.

Dell EMC's Chad Sakac believes channel partners can achieve profits and growth as the market for engineered systems and platforms takes hold but, like vendors, solution providers will have to undergo some difficult changes to be successful.

Amazon CTO Werner Vogels showcased a number of new services for the instance-independent computing techniques, as well as advanced developer, data processing and operations tools aimed at making infrastructure management easier for partners.

Doron Kempel says selling hyper-convergence can be challenging for solution providers, but success will come from taking business from competitors that are unprepared or hesitant to embrace the technology.